Why I hate Powerpoint

In most of my life, if I hate a product, I just stop buying or using it. But Powerpoint isn’t like that.

Powerpoint is chained to my ankle for life. And I hate it.

I really hate Powerpoint

I don’t hate Powerpoint because it dumbs down our world. (People do that).

And I don’t hate Powerpoint because it’s responsible for nine gazillion mind-numbing decks (people did those too).

I hate Powerpoint because it is BAD SOFTWARE. And, since it was launched in 1990 – 23 years ago! – and is on its umpteenth release and has been used by billions of people THIS IS INEXCUSABLE.

The only reason it can persist is that Powerpoint created and exploits a monopoly in presentation software. (Yes, I could use Keynote but most of the people I share my decks with cannot).

If there were even basic competition for this essential application, Powerpoint would have gone the way of the brown Zune.

Here’s why Powerpoint is such crappy software:

I have spent thousands of hours in Powerpoint. So even if I were in the Guinness Book of World Records under Cretin, I should have mastered it by now.

Not only have I not mastered it, I can’t even make it do the most basic things that I want without a ridiculous amount of faffing.

I can’t change the default font.

I can’t make it stop re-formatting my work.

I can’t put things where I want them.

I can’t detail the type except in the clunkiest way.

After thousands of hours of use, I ought to be able to do these things. After thousands of hours of use, a chimpanzee ought to be able to do these things.

Can anybody out there think of a tool in any other profession that is so central to that profession but so downright bad? I can’t either.

The two kinds of people who love Powerpoint

1) People who have no clue about how a document or presentation should look – they love Powerpoint because they are blind and ignorant. It gets words on pages fast. Job done.

2) People who read every manual and take every course – they love Powerpoint because they invested lots of time, money and effort getting really good at it. (There aren’t many of these people. Maybe ten Aspergic hobbyists with no cats, friends or loved ones).

Why people still buy and use something so crappy

Because the bastards bundled it with Office and made it the standard and we’re all stuck forever.

So, if you’re reading this Microsoft Powerpoint team: before calling your lawyers, please talk to your Usability Testing Team (You haven’t met them? Why does this not surprise me.) and tell them to watch a hundred normal people trying to wrestle something adequate out of your insanely frustrating software; then read their report and DO YOUR BLOODY JOBS. Please. Please. No really: please.

Is this just me?

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BTW: I have no ill-will towards Microsoft in general. Bill Gates turned out to be way more than just a human being, he’s a mega-mensch.

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Thanks Frank — but we didn’t make that one in Powerpoint — we used InDesign.

I wouldn’t even try to craft anything using the dreaded ‘Formatting Palette’. In fact, I do as little as possible in the program but I am forced into it a few times a week. My colleagues can tell by the high-pitched squeals and streams of expletives.

Yes, PowerPoint isn’t great for the average user. Neither is InDesign or indeed any software that we expect to get decent design outcomes from. You think the average business person can do cool stuff in Photoshop? No. Others can, because they learned how.

I take your point Joby. But I don’t even want to do cool stuff – I just want to determine what my slides look like instead of arguing with the software on virtually every slide!

Yes, I should probably invest some time getting better at it. But I resent needing a course in such a fundamental tool. Word seems to behave most of the time. Excel does amazing things for power users and is still usable for mortals. But Powerpoint seems to delight in frustrating even my most mundane needs.

I’m glad people like you are out there helping people like me master it – but it would be far better if we didn’t need help. This should be so simple by now.

I agree 100% on this one.
I’m trying to be PPT free since months, but sometimes I need to use it for corporate presentations. But I hate it.

The thing that bothers me the most is PPT is incredibly slow and heavy after 23 years.

Anyway, I start thinking that the best presentation is the one without any support. The presentation is the speaker, and this way of thinking is helping the crowd and the speaker to really interact, and this is the best part that is TOO OFTEN missed nowadays.

Anyway, in my mac I don’t have any presentation software. My last presentation was done using google drive (have to say I really dig neat presentation if I have to show something).

Add to that the completely random nature of video playing (will it? won’t it? on this pc? on that pc? If I email it to a colleague to check over and she changes 1 word on 1 slide and sends it back to me? And, oh, blow me down with a Dyson AirBlade, it can’t even play a WMV), PowerPoint is the work of the devil.

Horrible, horrible software which encourages people to think that they’re Cool and Cutting Edge because they can make a graphic spin and dissolve into another one.
And, ohh, what fun – a sliding transition! That’s how to win a pitch, right?

It’s like the early morning commuter train, but worse. We all hate using it but we seemingly have no other viable, consistent choice. What makes it worse, is that you can easily spend more time on Powerpoint than a commuter train, and it doesn’t try to be your choice of vehicle to share what may have been a lot of your valuable brain power. At least they’ve managed to get toilets on trains. Not being able to change your default font is the equivalent of still having to plan a pre-train toilet routine to avoid needing to go whilst on said vehicle. Who’d of thought – a commuter train can be something in a game of top trumps…….POWERPOINT!

Doug, why don’t you just use images rather than text? That gets around all your font issues. Plus, if you use a lot of text in PowerPoint, people are reading your slides when they should be listening to you talk. And, of course, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

I’m jumping in late here, but I’ve been wrestling with the very same limitations inherent to Powerpoint. In my search for a superior 21st century alternative, I have narrowed it down to three possible candidates:

All three alternatives boasted prettier visuals, with Prezi also offering that unique ‘spatial context’ functionality that enables a presentation to show the spatial relationship between slides instead of simply moving through them in a linear fashion.

For my own purposes, Haiku and Slideshare were out of contention immediately as a key requirement in my selection process was the ability to create, store and exhibit the presentation offline.

Prezi offers a desktop version of its software and it is possible to keep your presentations offline, however Prezi will only let you use its own selection of fonts out of the box, so you can’t apply your own corporate branding (it is possible to rewrite the software to facilitate this, but you must pay for custom coding to create a bepoke version of the software, branded for your company).

Therefore, although it isn’t pretty or very powerful, Powerpoint ultimately wins (for now) by simply lending itself more effectively to the core business requirements of its users.

Plus, we already have it built into Office (as you mentioned), so it’s the only option that doesn’t require the purchase of additional software.

Thanks for standing up for the most loathed software in the word, Laura.
I don’t doubt that it’s possible to do great things with it — but that’s despite the software not because of it!
(Okay, I admit, I just suck at it).
Thanks again.

David James | February 23rd, 2015

Completely agree, powerpoint has got to be one of the worst & most infuriating programs I have the misfortune of using. The fact that one can’t crop multiple pictures at once is what annoys me most, spending 2 hours cropping each picture individually as opposed to cropping them all identically is an absolute fucking joke.. Nothing I wish for more is if i could just delete the pile of shit sitting there on my desktop, but no.. it is the only presentation software used at my work and so it seems I just have to deal with it until the office manage to install keynote on the macs.

I’m PowerPoint-neutral but would love to try a cooler alternative that’s ubiquitous and allows everyone else to open and edit the file without a hitch no matter whether they’re on a Mac or PC. Oh there’s none? Okay.

I’ve read about these guys (duarte.com) who seem to really squeeze the juice out of PowerPoint though.

I agree, this software is garbage and it isn’t due to a lack of intelligence on the users part or the length of time a person has used this software.

I’m an engineering student, so please forgive my grammar.

To send an image of a document online, I want to use PP compress feature to remove the cropped data. I feel I am on par, I understand that was something I should do, and that PP could do.

The problem is that after reading half a dozen microsoft and private help pages. I can’t fucking figure out how to crop a small rectangle out of the picture.

I am only given preset shapes or to crop overall size. Microsoft Paint can do this. I just want to handle the entire operation in one software so that I am more certain the cropped data can’t be recovered.

[…] has been around for a while, doesn’t mean it’s flawless. PowerPoint is notorious for the hatred its users have often felt while using it. Though to be fair, some of that hatred isn’t really directed at the software […]

a hispanic computer service has been harrasing me for months . they wont take no as an answer. their calls on my landline phone are transmitted by POWER POINT. POWER POINT always says i cant talk to them.i receive their message via star 69. i was astounded to find this is a WINDOWS program?? Thanks A LOT!!!

You have just scratched the surface of what a pile of CRAP powerpoint is. It is PRINTER SETUP based so the document reflows. How can this be 2016 and we are still chained to this CRAP of all CRAP, powerpoint. And there is one even worse, PUBLISHER.

As a printer I am with you in my hatred. I have lost many days recreating a clients work in indesign or illustrator, just to be able to print it. Microsoft Powerpoint is maggot infestations of slimy wale dung. And I am being kind.

Doug, I’m so glad someone else on the internet feels the same way about powerpoint as I do. Its just the crumest. I have a been thinking of making a petition to get microsoft to get their crap together, and I was wondering if you would like to assist me in my endeavours? pls help me in this noble cause.